Julie Marin

Urban landscape design exercises in urban metabolism: reconnecting with Central Limburg's regenerative resource landscape

Abstract The design research presented here uses urban landscape design to attempt to reframe sustainable resource management. Urban metabolism projects generally originate in industrial ecology, emphasizing performance-oriented technical and entrepreneurial approaches.1 However, industrial ecology approaches experience difficulties in making meaningful connections to social, economic and spatial contexts. Building on landscape architecture analysis and design methods such as mapping and systemic design, this article will highlight urban landscape designs capacity to reframe questions stemming from the urban metabolism model through the production of future imaginaries. Using the Belgian Central Limburg regions transition into a circular economy as a design exercise, this paper suggests that urban landscape designs constructivist approach2 has the potential to embed social and economic dimensions in applying urban metabolism. Operating ‘from within’ its intervention field, urban landscape design potentially facilitates transdisciplinary dialogues in urban metabolism design research.

Landscape Architecture as Necessity

landslides or floods are daily reminders of climate change, but also of the necessity of an urbanization sustained and directed by landscape structures working with rather than against nature, as outlined in landscape urbanism (Waldheim 2006). Infrastructural urbanism reframes the landscape’s potential to become a soft and hybrid economic and ecological infrastructure guiding urbanism and transcending hard engineering solutions (Bélanger 2013, Carruth 2016). Both of the above positions reflect how current landscape architecture discourse and practice are increasingly taking the lead in complex multidisciplinary and crossscalar challenges related to climate change.[1]